Cultural Identity

Jill Lepore, the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, approaches the history of King Philip's War with a particular interpretative lens. She is not looking to give a general history of the war; in fact, few details of the history of the battles of the war are actually discussed. Instead, Lepore approaches the war as a kind of mystery. Why did King Philip's War happen? Why was it so gruesome? What motivated the two sides to fight as hard and as viciously as they did? Lepore's answer is that the conflict goes to the roots of the human psyche. King Philip's War derived from the struggle of two different groups to maintain their cultural, ethnic and community identities. Each side saw the other as threatening their very cultural existence.